On Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:17:38 -0600 Bioscience News <[email protected]> wrote:
> All this stuff about following being equated to spamming is nonsense. First, the act of following someone usually generates a message. When you first join Twitter, it's exciting to get new followers and you look forward to those messages. Then you start checking out the profiles to see if you want to follow back... and you find that you don't because it's a just a BambiBot or some other SpamBot. Soon you stop checking out your followers all together because the noise is too high in that channel. The content of the users' profile and existing Tweets are the payload of the Spam message communicated by following a user. Second, and more importantly, the social graph is part of the signal on Twitter. Part of the value of following a person may be the quality of their other followers. Without the Spam and the Ham in the following, you could browse the followers of those whose insight you appreciate and identify others who share that appreciation. You might even browse those they follow to try to find other users to follow like the one you had in common to begin with. Unless the content of the social graph is hand grown, or at least reasonably filtered, you lose the channel. So, yes, it is possible to have following Spam and it is a real problem for Twitter users. Chris Babcock
